Radio review

There was no point fighting stereotypes as you listened to Ireland - From Boom to Bust (Radio 4): every contributor to Olivia O'Leary's programme was lively, charming and told a great tale. Knocking on strangers' doors in the Dublin suburbs, O'Leary explained, everyone had welcomed her in and was happy to talk. "We are," she said after looking at the economic turmoil in the country, "still Irish."

I relished the way people talked about the boom. In the old days, said novelist Claire Kilroy, "you could be pale and freckly." Once the Celtic Tiger arrived, "you had to be orange and have the blonde hair". Spending among her contemporaries was out of control. "You could not blink," she recalled, thinking back to when hefty restaurant bills were brought to the table. Mostly, she said with feeling, Irish people shook off something that had made them collectively attractive: "We'd lost our Celtic voodoo. The mystic-Paddy thing."

Chef Richard Corrigan reached for figurative phrases to describe the crazy good times: "The Liffey flowed with champagne." He also measured the extent of the boom by comparing sales of white burgundy in his restaurants in Dublin and London. You don't get that with Robert Peston.

About this article

Radio review: Elisabeth Mahoney on From Boom to Bust (Radio 4)

This article appeared on p24 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Wednesday 10 June 2009.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.01 EDT on Wednesday 10 June 2009.
It was last modified at 07.20 EDT on Monday 19 May 2014.
It was first published at 19.07 EDT on Wednesday 10 June 2009.